SOURCE: Merkin, Daphne. “Rimbaud Rules.” The American Scholar 72, no. 1 (winter 2003): 45-52.

In the following essay, Merkin discusses Rimbaud's enduring influence on such modern artists as Jack Kerouac, Jim Morrison, and Bob Dylan.

Sometimes it seems as if anyone who has ever aspired to hipness has laid claim to the nineteenth-century poète maudit and Ur-Bad Boy Arthur Rimbaud. He was born to be wild, a room-trashing rock star with a passion for drugs, drink, and degradation well before the prototype existed—or so we have come to think. Rimbaud's mythic reputation is that of a debauched and restless prodigy whose genius flared briefly before he turned his back on literature at the age of nineteen to wander the globe in search of mercantile success. In the handful of years during which he produced his slender body of work, Rimbaud brought the rank odors of sex and the street...